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Aug 31 2020

# London Grip New Poetry – Autumn 2020

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The Autumn 2020 issue of London Grip New Poetry features:

*Zoe Brooks *Colin Pink *Tony Beyer *Leona Gom *Daniel Bennett *James Roderick Burns
*Jack Houston *Tom Phillips *Moya Pacey *Mary Franklin *Curtis Brown *Peter Kenny
*Angela Kirby *Kathleen McPhilemy *Ruth Valentine *Marie Dullaghan *Molly Burnell *Tanner
*Jane McLaughlin *Jennifer Johnson *Mary Robinson *Marion McCready *Fizza Abbas
*Bethany Rivers *Nancy Mattson *Jane Kirwan *Julia Duke *Phil Connolly *Pascal Fallas
*Alison Campbell *Shikhandin *Robert Nisbet *Rosemary Norman *Robin Houghton
*Sarah James *Ian C Smith *Fraser Sutherland *Phil Kirby *Stuart Henson *Emma Neale

Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors. Biographical notes on contributors can be found here

London Grip New Poetry appears early in March, June, September & December

A printer-friendly version of this issue can be found at
LG New Poetry Autumn 2020

SUBMISSIONS: please send up to THREE poems plus a brief bio to poetry@londongrip.co.uk
Poems should be in a SINGLE Word attachment or else included in the message body
Our submission windows are: December-January, March-April, June-July & September-October

Editor’s notes

Welcome to the second – but probably not the last – posting of London Grip New Poetry produced entirely in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic. The virus may not figure explicitly in many of the poems but its presence probably explains a note of foreboding that runs through this issue. We begin with large-scale themes of totalitarian dictatorship but soon move to more personal and domestic territory. Even here however the topics are darkish: reflections on memory & mortality; relationships under strain; cross-cultural tensions; struggles of growing up. And we end this issue with a handful of film noir vignettes. What these varied poems have in common as that they are all engaging, well-crafted and perceptive. It is gratifying that so many gifted poets are willing to entrust their work to us; and it has been a far from easy task to make the final selection that is now in your hands/on your screen

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
London Grip poetry editor
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    Zoe Brooks: Perhaps

    That Easter
    there were angels everywhere,
    electric in the air,
    a frisson of freedom,
    a lamentation of song.

    Perhaps it was the poet president
    racing through marble halls
    on a child's tricycle,
    arriving at meetings
    with a squeak and a crash;

    perhaps it was that cold spring
    wreathing the statues
    with garlands of mist,
    a spring that had been so long coming,
    arriving only with a jingle of keys;

    perhaps it was the candles
    guttering in Wenceslas Square,
    tears bejewelling the flowers with ice,
    the women bowing before
    the black and white photograph,

    that made us believe
    that this time history would not
    repeat its cruelties,
    that Prague's angels would not
    prove to have leaden wings.

    And there I was,
    so obviously alien
    that I walked
    in the middle of the pavement,
    without looking over my shoulder.

    In the warm light of Cafe Slavia,
    drunk on long black coffee,
    I asked about the future.
    And the answer was always the same –
    “Perhaps.”

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    Colin Pink: The Problems of Philosophy
    after Bertrand Russell

    The table I write at appears solid, smooth and polished;
    reflections of light glow white on its surface. If I turn
    my head the colours change, the highlights skate across
    the top; one edge looks longer but isn’t. Depending on

    your point of view it all looks different. To the painter
    these things are important. Russell’s elegant prose claims
    we always experience a veil of appearances, never reality;
    and to make it sound scientific he calls it ‘sense data’.

    That world seems to be reliable, dependably the same,
    tomorrow as it was today. And yet, we’re like chickens
    who everyday are fed by the farmer at the same time.

    But one day instead of feeding the chickens he wrings
    their necks. This is known as the problem of induction.
    And not a lot of chickens know that. And neither did I.

    Colin Pink: Never Accept Words from Strangers

    Did you pack these words yourself? Has anyone
    given you words to carry for them? Have you left your
    vocabulary unattended at any point in your journey?

    As they snap on the rubber gloves to probe,
    persuade and intimidate you realise
    you’re costive with words that aren’t yours.

    Don’t accept words from strangers
    however well-meaning they appear.
    Remember: Cui bono? Cui bono?

    Remove their hand from your crotch/purse/mouth;
    rip out their fake smiles with your teeth.
    There’s violence folded within everyday phrases:

    Take Back Control,
                  Economic Migrants,
                                  Make [INSERT NATION HERE] Great Again.

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    Tony Beyer: Turn

    the new leader’s dead eyes
    don’t change expression
    while the question is asked
    or as he intones his answer

    the impression this gives
    is that anything he says
    must be obvious anyway
    to anyone with any sense

    he’s not interested in those
    who aren’t listening to him
    it’s the troubled and fearful
    of change who are his target

    unless it’s the change back
    he’s already announced
    to perks and entitlements
    for those who favour him

    his aim is to control a
    population more than half
    of whom won’t concern him
    once the votes are in

    he needs losers to help
    his winners feel affirmed
    withholding the charitable
    glad hand for photo ops

    snipping open the ribbon
    on a track through the bush
    or cannily distributing
    cosy appointments

    these are the purposes
    for which his upright carriage
    his impeccable menswear
    were calculated

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    Leona Gom: 62 Billionaires
    62 billionaires own as much wealth as half the world’s population
      —Oxfam report, 2016, cited in Beyond Banksters, by Joyce Nelson

    They could all fit into your house,
    these owners of the world.  Imagine them
    there, not that comfortable and not exactly
    friendly but agreeing to give it a try.  But
    what could you talk about?  The weather?
    Of course they own that, too, so
    the subject is not as safe as it sounds.
    And what as a good hostess could you possibly
    offer them?  Even a glass of water already belongs
    to them in a way you can barely understand.

    The ones that talk might be willing to answer
    a question or two about their favourite possessions:
    a favourite wife, an island, a sled, a government.
    They might even express a certain bewilderment
    at how they have become this rich.  It seemed
    to take no effort at all, they admit.  At some point
    it was so easy to buy the laws and the lawmakers
    they could do it in their sleep, and they did.
    Perhaps they even blame you, wondering why
    you did not stop them.  Now, of course,
    it’s too late.  They murmur about algorithms
    and portfolios beyond their control.

    When they leave they will be polite.
    They will smile, collusively, across the room
    at each other.  At you the smile is something
    else, but not pity, not any more.  Pity is
    always an early divestiture, and it, too,
    is no longer under their control.

    Leona Gom: The Lenins
      —after reading Budapest, by Rick Steves

    Back to back now or facing each other
    across the memorial Budapest park,
    moved from their pedestals in city squares
    and courtyards, from government buildings,
    to this graveyard of communist statues, stately
    or with arms raised, looking up, looking down,
    holding a flag, a book, a gesture, brought here
    while the nineties hammered their century shut.

    Overnight gone from honour to disdain,
    not pulled down in retribution but
    parked in a garden of broken ideas,
    not turned to honest rubble but to warnings,
    to kitsch for the tourists happy to pay
    and take their comical selfies and get
    back on the bus to capitalism.

    What do the Lenins murmur to each other in
    the winter evenings when the park is closed?
    What messages of regret and sadness?
    Stalin, they whisper, you there in the east
    corner, all your fault, you insane bastard,
    who knows where we might be now
    without you.  The snow falls into
    all his death, all that silence.

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    Daniel Bennett: The Panda

    The sounds of the house begin above him,
    a family waking. He thinks of Stalin
    preferring a sofa to a presidential bed,
    of the ace of pentacles gleaming
    from the apocrypha of a bookshelf
    of the bottle of Cahors he drank last night,
    a black wine, dark as a tarot reader's smile.
    He winds the blanket tighter, but sleep
    has vanished for another day.
    Stalin lay dead for days because lackeys
    wouldn't wake him. Lucky Stalin.
    He considers how all things are rare
    and fleeting: power, ambition, sleep,
    the ephemera that crams inside a head,
    even the emptiness that ensues
    when loves disappears. Already,
    this day is spoiled.
                                      Through the glass door
    of the lounge, his daughter watches.
    For how long he can't tell. Her gaze moves
    from the space he occupies, back upstairs,
    towards his former habitat. A radio sounds,
    a song about hips meeting, kisses,
    the rest. He lifts himself with the blanket
    wrapped about him, smiles and waves,
    because captivity should be safe for all.
    The girl retreats. He sees his reflection
    in the shine on glass: his pot belly,
    eyes dark from sleep. New footsteps
    press on the stairs, subtle and hesitant.
    He begins to dance across the cage,
    his claws scraping on squeaking boards,
    his tongue probing a shred of green bamboo.

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***

    James Roderick Burns - haiku

    Two dogs
    boxing in the park –
    dusting of blossoms

    Muggy day –
    beyond blackbird hedge,
    a patient cat

    At the insect’s
    approach, a lilac-bush
    begins to quiver

    Hard wind –
    pawnbroker’s eagle
    itches to fly

    Sun-warmed rat,
    war-memorial plinth
    all to himself

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    Jack Houston: sparrows

    there’s at least corn
    flakes a dozen
    mixed nuts in the fish
    fingers bushes near
    the end bananas
    of our avocados flats
    flitting coffee goat’s
    cheese in and those
    little yoghurts out
    of the kids like
    the foliage splitting
    whatever they’re
    Marmite doing between
    each washing up other
    food probably liquid
    the finding of
    the search for olive
    sustenance oil there one
    mustard moment gone
    the raisins next I
    haven’t time to stand
    and oat cakes
    watch them though

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    Tom Phillips: Unfair assumptions about pigeons

    The pigeons strut across what’s left of the lawn
    like generals or politicians inspecting frontline mud
    on the day after the last shot sounded in a war.
    They’ll glean nothing from this compacted earth.

    A smaller, prouder finch has its tail feathers up.
    It knows when it’s under threat and does its best
    to make a voice heard above mechanical coos
    from the frog-marching, land-grabbing pigeons.

    As if in an allegory, our downstairs neighbour appears.
    He plugs a hosepipe onto the garden tap and turns
    a sudden spurt of water over parts of the yard
    he’s doing his best to cultivate despite the birds.

    Later, when the sun slides down apartment facades,
    bats will hurl their soft, dark bodies through free air.

    10 April 2019, Sofia

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    Moya Pacey: Birders

    Instead of smelting steel or driving
    forklifts at the port, men are buying bird
    books, spotting, making blogs, competing.
    Last week, Pete scored a willow warbler.
    Harry beat that with an orange-breasted
    whinchat. Wildlife Centres springing
    up where smokestacks once belched
    hot air and muck. Dads and grandads
    walking lads out over marsh,
    telling tales of birds’ long journeys.
    Places where they fed, watered,
    rested in sanctuaries now disappeared.

    In the hide, men whisper names—
    shoveler, pochard, lapwing,
    redshank—once a glossy ibis.
    The lads are their apprentices.
    Men help them to adjust the lenses
    of binoculars, so that when
    they close one eye and squint,
    they see
    the world changed
    	 for birds and men.

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    Mary Franklin: Lost and Found

    Clearing space in the attic
    for another box of books
    the skirling of swallows
    under gathering clouds
    warns me of the onset
    of a summer storm. I lean

    an arm on the windowsill,
    watch a squirrel scurry up
    three-sided, blue-green needles
    of a tamarack, then vanish
    among its mysterious foliage.
    My foot touches something odd.

    A child’s memory guides me
    to a voice I loved that for years
    I have heard only in dreams
    and I stare down at an old
    vinyl record, the label torn,
    destroyed by damp and time.

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    Curtis Brown: Between Lines

    Should I read the lines of your life   I fear I may
    neither find myself amongst them   nor indeed
    between them    despite having written them
    with you throughout our many years   so I sing
    my own song to you as we embrace   my tears
    falling down your back    onto the horizon
    shimmering   a mirage of salt water   yet I count
    this painful blessing more favourable than the fear
    of a stranger in your eyes as they gaze upon
    my face   and search for it between the fading lines...

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    Peter Kenny: The door in the wall

    Orange bollards, the bus gridlocked.
    From its top deck I see a plane tree’s shadow;
    how distinct leaf shapes shoal over a wall
    of whitewashed brick, and a green door.
    I fox this page with a memory: a summer
    when I, a boy from the flats, trespassed
    through bramble, stingers and Bramley trees,
    into private gardens. I climbed on damp,
    back-broken sheds, parachuting bindweed trumpets
    into the spiders’ Germany of flowerpot towers
    and wood-loused tenements of rotten wood.
    I tried every door, hoping to steal into a story,
    a walled garden perhaps, where a woman
    is waiting with the book of me open on her lap,
    my choices forking through its pages.

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    Angela Kirby: Rain

    Sometimes in those long wet northern summers
    a solitary child wanders out into the sodden garden
    and makes her way through a dripping arch
    of golden hops to the long wood which only a few
    short weeks ago she’d seen awash with bluebells.

    Now she finds that one well-hidden clearing
    from which to see a thin grey swab of sky, and lying
    on the damp earth she offers herself up to the rain
    till all her lonely pain is washed  away and she feels
    whole again, redeemed by this secret baptism.

    Angela Kirby: 3 AM

    no moon, no stars, no sirens
    no cat yowls, no dog howls
    only a small clear voice persists
    ‘On whose walls will your pictures
    hang, where will two thousand books
    find home, who will then dust
    the Staffordshire,  Chelsea, Spode
    Crown Derby, Famille Rose
    and those Meissen figurines?’
    Lying here, one thing’s for sure -
    when I go – which may be soon
    I’ll no longer know nor care

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    Kathleen McPhilemy: Months of Sundays
    It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
    What was to be the value of the long looked forward to
    Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
    And the wisdom of age?		 T S Eliot, East Coker

    Desultory whistling from the garden next door
    the rumble of a neighbour’s lawnmower:
    Sunday again;
    Confined to my category
    I can hardly be bothered to name the days.

    I don’t think I can get used to this.
    For all its imperfections
    I miss
    the world we had.
    When I considered age and death
    I expected to grow old
    in the world I knew;
    I thought when I died
    I would leave a me-shaped space
    and others would carry on
    around an emptiness
    they recognised
    accepted
    and remembered me by.

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    Ruth Valentine:  At Mortlake

    For ten minutes I was not living my own life

    though somebody stepped down
    from the train to the platform    it was
    a day in spring
    not raining    not quite sunny

    somebody crossed to the far side of the line
    however you cross there   waited
    a gap between lorries

    threaded herself into the alleyway
    and out onto the towpath
    not flooded that afternoon
    then at the gate

    into the cemetery    somebody became
    me    but I tell you I was not
    living that life

    in those minutes I was walking
    back along the river towards the city
    downriver to Kew
    or sitting
    in the sun on the green
    watching a small girl run after a pigeon

    or I was hitting someone or fucking someone
    in the non-existent station underpass

    or writing a poem or lying in bed with you
    half asleep in your arms
    I wish I had been lying
    in your arms those lost minutes

    the doctor says
    sooner or later I will lose much more

    Ruth Valentine: Cloths Used For Oiling May Spontaneously Combust*

    along with elderly shopkeepers in Dickens,
    hayricks, things focussed through a piece of glass,
    people in lockdown.

    Spontaneous combustion: a useful skill
    we all should aspire to.  The fat cremation fees
    you'd save your estate!  And think of the satisfaction
    of selecting when and where: the local park,
    that dress shop where they looked at you like dirt,
    which you'll be once the flames die down.  Or Downing Street.

    I'm rehearsing already: sitting out in the sun,
    overheating the bedroom.
    I just need to know I can, when the time comes:
    a fortnight of driving rain, say, or politicians
    claiming Everything's under control, and smiling, smiling.

    *warning on a bottle of Danish furniture oil

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    Marie Dullaghan: Smoking

    We waited long minutes under dark clouds.

    When the time came, my sister could not enter,
    stood instead among the screened rubbish bins.

    My son went to her, placed a lit cigarette
    between her lips.

    I broke protocol; entered the building first.
    Those who had gathered, followed, awkward, hesitant.

    In the centre of the room, a flutter like bird wings
    in my chest. Anxious.

    Oh God!  How alike these cousins!
    I never noticed – the beard, the nose, the hair,

    the younger outside with his aunt,
    cigarette smoke struggling up through damp air,

    the other in here, godless voices
    in unfamiliar prayer surround his coffin.

    Then the rain.
    Loud fat drops, beating the roof, the doors, the windows.

    Strangers in black suits fastened the lid.

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    Molly Burnell: Fragility

    You look up from your cigarette
    as a black horse gallops by, burning

    a flickering orange-yellow tail
    into the dark, into your eyes.

    A mane of flailing flames
    upon its veined neck,

    disjointed wisps of fire-tips
    dying into sooty air.

    You stand and you watch,
    before relinquishing the paper

    pinched between your index
    and middle, like it isn’t there,

    letting it fall onto a paper path
    and scatter its glowing ashes

    on the wind, into paper trees,
    paper grass and your paper self.

    Every edge curls into the dark
    because everything is thin

    and prone to catching fire,
    falling to tiny pieces

    at the slightest touch, the caressing
    and consuming
    of yellowing fingers
    and blackening nails.

    Molly Burnell: Secrets

    Tear me to secrets
    like I’m paper
    etched with words
    that won’t ink
    out of my mouth
    onto the air.

    You can chew
    on an untasted cut
    of me in your head,
    over and over;
    a slice of stale bread
    broken into smaller,

    easier-to-swallow chunks.
    But if you do swallow
    and the taste brings tears,
    don’t feed me
    to the ducks scattered
    through the park like crumbs,

    or the homeless man
    swept into the doorway
    of the boarded-up
    Chinese takeaway,
    on your walk back
    to your parents.

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    Tanner: you have to give her that

    she’d be crying
    when she’d tell you

    you’re too short
    or you don’t make enough money
    or you’ll never be a writer

    she’d be crying
    as she said these things
    and she’d be nodding

    and to everyone else in the bar
    it would look like
    she was agreeing with
    something hurtful
    you were saying
    to her

    and when a couple of white knights
    who’d been watching
    would come over

    she’d look away
    embarrassed
    inadvertently showing them
    the walnut bruise on her cheekbone
    she got from falling down drunk

    and then she wouldn’t say
    anything.

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    Jane McLaughlin: Way In

    please enter your Pin number
    please enter your password
    please enter your username
    please enter the second, sixth and eighth letters of your memorable word
    please enter your grandmother’s shoe size
    please enter your last cholesterol reading
    please enter the name of your window cleaner’s wife
    please say five Hail Marys and one Our Father

    sorry your details have not been recognised

    please click on this link to reset your password

    please select a memorable question

    what is your mother’s maiden name?
    what is the name of your first school?
    who is the muse of lyric poetry?
    in what constellation is the star Deneb?
    who wrote the Almagest?
    why are you bothering to answer these questions?
    why do you want to spend your money on products
    produced by slave labour on the other side of the world?

    please enter your email address

    sorry that email address is not recognised

    please register your details here to set up a new account

    sorry that address is already in use

    please enter your username

    sorry that name does not exist

    sorry your identity has been deleted from cyberspace

    Abandon hope all ye who fail to enter here

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***

    Jennifer Johnson: Passages

    In this coastal town
    white poverty protects itself
    with flags and dogs.
    Visitors climb to the fort
    that guarded against strangers
    for millennia, look down
    on ferries that feed this port.

    Underneath the castle
    lies chalk of the sort
    teachers taught and
    frightened me with,
    rock worm-eaten
    by defensive passages
    carved out in countless wars.

    These chalk tunnels
    dig into my memory,
    my childhood obscured
    by Sudanese sandstorms.
    A plane simply flew my family
    into clearer weather,
    first to Malta, then London.

    Are those head-scarfed women
    sitting on the bench
    tourists or have they made
    one of those epic journeys
    you see on the news
    crossing shifting sand dunes,
    Mediterranean waves?

    It makes no difference
    to the tattooed drunk pulled
    by his metal-chained fighting dog.
    He swears into the coastal gale
    that takes away his voice.
    The women put on dark coats,
    cover their bright clothes.

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***

    Mary Robinson: Beirut
    for Josie

    The trees would have been greening up impossible places
    in empty houses and on roof tops

    it would have been spring in the city but on the mountains snow

    she would have come at the same moment you took out your phone
    outside the French café just down from the Armenian church
    with its pock-marked yellow stone and rose window

    she would have been standing behind me
    in an ankle-length robe patterned in gold and purple
    the hem soiled and frayed by the Beirut streets

    strands of ash-grey hair escaped from her scarf

    her knuckles poked through her tissue skin
    and one eye was clouded over like marble

    she would have been carrying a child.

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***

    Marion McCReady: Her Hair is a Landscape of its Own
    for Ruby

    I am scaling the cliff face of her hair to reach her -
    my summit-daughter, hair-raiser, my blood-stone girl.
    She is a cut asterism adorning an armour of hair.
    When I loosen her pleats, a storm rises.
    February gales batter our windows, Clyde squalls
    tie ships to their harbours. The cinnamon falls
    of her hair engulf me, follow me like notes
    plucked from a guitar – each string vibrating
    through the air songs from a girl's hair.

    The girl is my ten-year-old daughter.
    Daily I traverse her jungle; snakes
    squirming between us. Growing for so long,
    brushed, combed, the hair of my daughter
    is her signature. The hair of my daughter
    wraps her up in a hair parcel – all bows
    and ribbons with the bite of a feral dog.
    The hair of my daughter is her doppelganger -
    her image caught in its many folds.

    It knows the language of pony tails, braids,
    bands and bobbles. Her hair has been dyed red,
    dyed purple. Her hair hangs around her,
    a thick veil coiling when it senses danger.
    The hair of my daughter is as old
    as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,
    mysterious as the riddle of the Sphinx
    and the riddle is growing day by day.

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***

    Fizza Abbas: The Unburnt Toast

    A pale, brown woman with unkempt tresses
    walks along the pavement. The asphalt and concrete cracked with age:
    A barren thoroughfare of desires - A road to hell in-the-making

    Her black eyes look around
    the remnants of a half-eaten apple look tempting.

    She hides it secretly inside her cleavage -
    A feeble attempt at a brutal revenge
    Those once altruistic soldiers become mannequins.

    My poor Pakistani mother in a slum
    Too has feelings, too has rage.

    They say have patience, you will get the aid you deserve.

    Don't they know the toast has burnt and the jam is now wet?

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***

    Bethany Rivers: Awaken
    In a bombed-out street, wind moves the lips
    of a politician on a poster. Ilya Kaminsky

    This is not a bombed-out country
    but the hospitals are suddenly
    full of dying black women who
    do not know a word of English.
    They are older than Snowdonia, the
    Pennines, Ben Lomond, Ben Nevis.  Yet
    they are as young as you or me.
    The doctors can’t seem to diagnose
    any sickness, yet their vitals are
    fading fast.  The papers are full
    of the news, thousands of black
    women who know that truth
    is dying.  They have given birth
    to generations of Africans, Australians,
    Americans, they know where blood
    comes from.  They don’t know what
    a mobile phone is or any kind of computer,
    yet they’re all connected, every one of them
    loses another breath, another heartbeat,
    at the exact same hour, across the land.
    They breathe as one together.  They die
    as one together.  The doctors don’t know
    what to do.  The papers are full of the news,
    thousands of black women who know the truth
    and don’t speak our native tongue, are dying.
    Deep within, we know their ancient wisdom,
    but we’ve forgotten it.  Our only hope
    is to dream their dying breath into us,
    breathe their truth into our dreams,
    awake with their language on our lips.

    Bethany Rivers: Once upon a voice

    It was a dark ink spot, dried many years ago, at the back in the far
    corner of an old fashioned school desk.  It looked black at first, but
    upon closer inspection, it was navy blue, spreading like a
    Rorschach blot to lighter shades.  The desk was hidden in the wings of
    the school stage, the school itself closed down decades ago.

    snapped rulers
    long corridors
    to whistle down

    I liked the smell of the desk, the squeak of its hinge as I opened it.
    I liked the quiet rebellion of the ink, not finding the page to articulate
    words, but to be quietly raucous, spoiling any books or papers that
    may have been there.  The ink learning to find its own shape.

    kiss the grain of wood
    sink in
    deeper

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***

    Nancy Mattson: Student Mobilization Order, Fire Prevention Unit
    Hiroshima, 6 August 1945  [After photographs by Hiromi Tsuchida]

    That we cannot find our children
    	And we trained them to prevent

    That blackness fell in flakes
    	And the ashes were

    That the world went silent
    	And our tongues

                             *

    That I found Akio’s jacket hanging
    	And nothing else on the tree

    That the badges I sewed on the arms
    	And the threads held

    That I can hold his jacket, its torn shoulder
    	But not his body, my first-born son

                             *

    That I found Yokisho’s water bottle, twisted
    But not her body, my only daughter

                             *

    That I found Reiko’s lunch box, intact
    Her peas and rice uneaten, carbonized

                             *

    That we are breathing into our lungs
    Our children’s bodies, vaporized

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***

    Jane Kirwan: Mystery

    His homework is to make a time-line of the crucifixion
    – what is a time-line?
    Grandparents must have taken him to church in Enugu,
    have knelt with him before the altar.
    Surely he noticed the silence once the heavy door shut
    leaving the heat, red dust, crowds outside?
    He can’t remember a priest or any incense
    – maybe there was singing –
    no memory of pictures: journey of a man to his death.
    How to explain the Stations of the Cross?
    He knows train stations in South London,
    which ones to avoid
    but how to keep him safe, this gentle boy?
    How to explain the point
    – the viciousness behind the group over there
    or those there, throwing dice –
    of religions: crown of thorns, nails driven in,
    a crowd jeering, cheering the murderers on.
    How to learn about suffering: shuffling from image
    to image, slowing the breath, constricting the chest.
    He’s eleven, lives with Roblox and Minecraft
    and police tape, and gangs.
    How to explain the rage, the blindness,
    slide of a blade as it slices into the dying man’s side.

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***

    Julia Duke: The Wrestlers
    inspired by 'Wrestlers' (linocut), Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, c. 1914

    Intimacy hovers, poised at the point of a knife:
    the artist's decision, skilful incision, will shape
    the outcome of this skirmish. When a scuffle
    breaks out among boys who knows
    where it will end.

    No easy brush strokes; each cut made with purpose.
    Each thrust of the knife a new thrust
    in their struggle. Each twist of the torso
    a deep violation, a mute exhortation,
    a tentative knowing.

    Interwoven, interlocking, grasping and gasping,
    panting and rasping, poised on the cusp
    of success, almost basking,
    then a plunging, sudden lunging,
    interlinking, almost sinking.

    Blood runs deep. It's thicker than water.
    They grapple and tussle, inextricable tangle,
    convolution of limbs, a contortion, a wrangle.
    Caught up with each other in
    the search for a brother.

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***

    Phil Connolly: Granite Zachary

    Rock ‘ard Zach to his mates.
    He’s cock o’ the class by a chasm
    and needs to be to put his fists up
    and defend the honour
    of his perfectly normal nose
    against the lies of friends, so called,
    whose baiting would persuade him,
    from the wariness of distance:
    Zach the hooter, Zach the conk,
    yer sneck’s as long as an elephant’s trunk.

    But chants are trance-inducing. Plus clear
    numerical advantage makes them bold.
    Lifting a shoulder towards their cheeks,
    raising and dropping that arm, charging
    towards him they’re doing the elephant –
    charging towards him retreating
    and charging they trumpet and scram,
    trumpet and trumpet and scram.

    Zachary collars each in turn, blackens
    and cracks, fattens and thickens and smacks
    an eye, a tooth, a lip a lug a gob until,
    for want of breath, the action stalls.
    Zach’s unmarked but smarts: betrayed.
    The bloodied, battered and bruised
    affect a grin. They might declare
    the score a draw, if this were just a game.

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***

    Pascal Fallas: The Letting Go

    I know you lie in the dark still moving
    around the wild topography of school
    and humiliation. Wind-blasted and sore
    on some borderless moor of adolescence

    with no fixed end, no moment where
    you say: yes, now this is an adult’s
    life. You know I also swallowed
    those gruff years whole like adder eating vole.

    Hurt from a quarter century back
    sometimes cries like curlew here in the night
    and echoes between our mirrored backs.
    And you tell me without hesitation that curlews

    don’t cry in the dark, but did I say that
    out loud and is it really true?
    Besides what I mean is not that
    but instead: why are we still thigh-deep

    in the cotton grass of forming personalities?
    Why are we still perched on those high
    youthful outcrops reliving errors
    that freeze me now? Do you feel this too?

    Are you also stopped by the danger and shameful
    behaviour that lies and revives in the mind?
    Do you know I have such thoughts that pull
    with the density of a fell and land as ice-sharpened

    rain which sheers across the landscape
    to meet my face? You too have this owl-dish
    opened to signals from the past: flattened
    cheeks, broad bones, ears

    expansive and locked onto distant noise
    beaming, booming. You retain everything
    and the children are out there now, roaming
    through their own moorland of heather

    and flooded streams, lonely abandoned
    farms and sodden ground, collecting
    and storing it all, wind-blind and ignorant.
    Should they forget nothing too?

    Perhaps after everything we are all
    the same, here in the dark, fuller
    than we know and moved to a halt.
    We are stuck here lying, lying still.

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***

    Alison Campbell: Off sick from work

    In bed, my daughter sleeps
    away her illness.  I sit reading
    In the swivel chair by her table.
    The noon sun falters; snow
    is imminent. I turn the chair to catch
    more light, turn a page over.

    It’s like this time over –
    we sit with children sleeping,
    watching, waiting for them to catch
    themselves.  But unlike reading.
    this quiet seems fragmentary, like snow –
    soft, deep, never immutable.

    My arms and head rest on the table.
    We breathe in tandem.  She curls over,
    sighs.  I pull the blind against the snow
    dazzle and drift into a sleep
    of sorts. (Tiredness has made reading
    pall.) There’s a pull to try and catch

    the essence of her being. I catch
    my breath as she flails an arm. The table
    creaks as I stir. The book she’s read
    falls to the floor. The cat starts, jumps over
    her foot. She doesn’t wake from the sleep
    she needs; recuperative. It’s now

    dimmer. Slight wind drifts the flakes of snow
    against the pane. Does it bring dreams, or catch
    you unawares – pull you into a deeper sleep?
    The cat springs up, comfortable
    on the bed again, kneading the quilt over
    and over, till he nests down. I read

    into this an acceptance, a readiness
    to claim sleep as his right, too. Snow
    falls faster, covers gardens. Day’s over.
    The sun dips, just catching
    the standing mirror, tilted, on the table;
    a shiny dream-catcher reflecting sleep.

    The snow soothes – it’s inevitable.
    We catch the day, then it’s over.
    Sleep comes – we’re more than ready.

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***

    Shikhandin: Snow From Your Cell Phone

    You hold up the irregular pentagon
    you scooped up from the sidewalk. You promise not to eat it.
    The road swings as you walk. The path you take
    to college, to your rooms. The store where you buy
    sifted rye flour, and I
    googled to find out if chapattis could be made
    from it. Broccoli is cheap here, you say,
    a satisfied smile lighting up your snow-kissed face.
    Thank goodness they speak English here. But you’ve learnt
    to say ‘tack’ and a few other words already. Neither
    of us had seen snow before. So, you show
    it to me again. Its edges melting into your mitten-warm
    hand and off the screen. You wave and I see
    the snow falling like possibilities
    from the trees. You aim at the ground.
    Your footprints on the talc-like surface,
    so deliciously clean. And then up, towards cloud-bright
    sky with a tatting of blue. European crows
    gather – a murder of crows, right? – near
    a snow dusted bench. A red truck slides forward. Your canvas.
    A lock of your hair swings out of vision. My canvas.
    Our brown irises eat picture-postcard beauty. Indian plum

    is a February fruit. We offer it first to our Goddess
    of learning, who rides a snow-white
    swan. You have shown me snow, but I’ll never
    show you my hidden snowstorm. The rink
    of frozen tears where I skate
    my anxieties away. My knees shake
    like leaves. The fruit’s sharp sweetness nips
    my tongue. I show you its white flesh
    beneath smooth green skin. You pretend
    to lick your ice-clod. You throw a balled-up challenge
    at me before you go in
    to your laboratory. Your world shuts its door. But
    your voice lingers long after my cell phone
    has turned darkly mute. I shut your room. It feels
    so distant now, and cold. I hold the ball of yarn I’d meant
    to crotchet into a scarf. A piece of lint wafts. A sunray
    catches it. Softly. Like a footfall in the snow.

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***

    Robert Nisbet: Blue Stockings
    She goes to London University in 1935

    Phrases like depravity and lusts of the flesh
    and abomination were mercifully absent
    from the minister’s remarks, that summer evening
    when the chapel marked her departure
    and wished her well. He simply spoke
    of a plethora of new experiences.

    The envious called her Bluestocking. She read
    for her BA in history, she talked of Marx
    and Fox and Pankhurst, the still-suspect Darwin.
    She bought blue stockings too, a lovely pair,
    on one of her dawdles down Petticoat Lane.

    One evening Michael laid embracing hands
    on stocking and leg. Their breathing
    was wet with wine, and the hint, the whiff,
    of a hitherto unknown communion.

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***

    Rosemary Norman: Symphony Jane

    There was a blackbird on the lawn
    singled them out

    the instant she was put into his arms
    as any child might be,

    and that’s a well-known omen
    though of what, he saw

    no consensus online. He named her
    Symphony, for a life

    long, complex and with various discords
    eloquently placed. She

    had mumps, measles and glue ear
    and was Simmie at school.

    She came downstairs with such sureness
    he knew this was a tryst

    not a date. She hugged him and was gone
    to that young man

    he must suppose has sable plumage
    and eyes rimmed with gold.

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***

    Robin Houghton: Hazel is fascinated by space

    When you kick that football to the edge of the lawn and ask
    where should I put the tennis ball we talk about relative size
    and distance and relative scale. There's no room for the sun
    in this garden or even this town so we stick with planet Earth
    and Moon. Out comes the tape measure just about here I say.
    We contemplate the balls. The moon is bigger than I thought
    but I'm loath to tell you this for fear of breaking your reverie
    or letting on that the more you know the more ignorant you feel.
    Instead I tell you about the mini-moon the size of a family car
    just passing by when Earth pulled it in. No-one knows where
    it's driving from or to, or quite how long it's been hitchhiking—
    a dot of a thing, with pretentions—smooth arriviste spooling away
    while the real Moon, blue moon, lovely moon of all our dreams
    and nights hums its own song, looks to its shadow, assesses
    the cesspit of its universe with all the satellites, abandoned bits
    of craft, landing gear, sundry items dropped by astronauts,
    the whole orbiting junkyard necklacing our planet just out of reach.
    I want to tell you it wasn't always like this, it wasn't about us.
    Meanwhile mini-moon, baby-moon, emergent with hope and pathos
    on its egg-shaped path, is soon to be flung away, yet again.

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***

    Sarah James: Marcasite

    The watch Nan gave me never worked
    longer than a few months. The trick,
    she reminded me, was to keep it wound,

    but not over-wind it. Whatever colour
    her wig, Nan’s curls were always sleek
    and tight. She’d clutch my wrist, tell me

    I was her favourite – her first, prized
    eldest grandchild, though perhaps
    she said likewise to my sister and cousins.

    She smiled, toothy as a polished watch-cog,
    even as she grew thinner and shorter,
    even as she out-survived one daughter.

    Her intricate silver-linked watch
    hangs loosely on my wrist, unticking.
    I finger the strap; each tiny marcasite

    still shines as bright as her eyes did.

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     Ian C Smith: Inside a Room

    Hopper glimpses through one of the many windows in this city, a man hunched
    forward who reads.  A woman sits, turned away from him, one finger on a piano’s
    keys.  His newspaper casts shadow on a round table separating them.  Framed
    pictures within this frame in the background blur like some memories.  Between
    viewer and foreground, unseen, lies Greenwich Village’s resting pulse, all that has
    happened, shall happen.  We see what might be a closed door, but no handle,
    perhaps the bedroom.  The night washes them in angled light.  What scents pervade
    this room?  Does she pick out a favourite composer?  Satie?  Something elegiac, or
     the strain, Santa Lucia, from the recent movie, A Farewell to Arms?  A Mills Brothers
    song?  Has hearing her solitary notes become his habit?

    .          Now, here, her name kissed
              gone dancing with ghosts of lust
              body heat lingers.

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***

    Fraser Sutherland: The Scandinavian Detective

    He wakes early, finding darkness in the dawn.
    He hasn’t slept long or well. He makes himself a cup of tea,
    a restful time before a restless day. For some years
    his wife’s been absent, she couldn’t take the irregular hours
    of a dedicated detective, the uniformity of his dourness.
    He looks out a window on the street. It’s snowing, though
    it will soon change to rain, hail, fog, or sleet. He hopes
    his old car will start, but doesn’t expect it to. He’d get another
    if he could afford it. His key doesn’t make it go. He’ll have to
    walk to the squat grey building with one light burning,
    his office waiting for him, desk strewn with uncompleted paperwork.
    He pours the first of the many cups of the toxic coffee
    in which the squad room specializes. They won’t get better.
    As the hours pass he checks the office of a colleague
    to see if he’s in. He isn’t. He never is.
    Nor is his boss, the police chief, she’s on another floor,
    making a statement to the press. Back at his desk
    he reads again a daily thickening file about the bones,
    the friendless bones he broods about awake or in fitful sleep.
    Nobody knows where they came from, or how long
    they’ve lain, caked with earth, in the unearthed hole.
    He should go out to lunch but orders instead a sandwich.
    Then he’ll have to tell his team to meet and hear of nothing new
    but they’ll keep on doing what they have to do.
    He’ll get answers eventually but won’t like them when he does.
    He reads the file again, then puts it aside.
    As he often does, he ponders getting a quiet place in the country,
    the acquisition of a dog.

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    Phil Kirby: A Model Wife

    How she becomes his masterpiece
    with every stroke, each subtle daub
    of blue or green on her bare arms,
    beneath one eye, that shadowed flesh
    almost concealed by rose-blush tints
    applied to each cheek. Instructed
    by him in every pose, she sits –
    in a plain dress of his choosing,
    hair styled and tied to his desire –
    as he creates her public face:
    the shallow smile and haunted look
    that some critics will interpret
    wrongly, calling it dispassion,
    while remarking on the artist’s
    skill in capturing her likeness,
    her spirit, in two dimensions.

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    Stuart Henson: Every Breath You Take

    A hit based on a misconception.
    Well, people hear what they want to hear.
    So now when fear stalks like a predator
    greedy for TV’s lurid disconnects,
    hot to emerge and shake our hands
    like one of Juke Box Jury’s waiting bands
    and words get twisted to the sinister
    each time the experts turn their thumbs
    it’s harder still to fill your lungs, to hum
    along, like when some jumped-up minister
    coughs out statistics from an autocue…
    Yet all the while you know I’m watching you,
    helpless, ear-wormed, undone by that song—
    and its insistence that we read it wrong.

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    Emma Neale: Arrhythmia

    The young physician
    jogs the tree-canopied avenue

    white earphones hutched
    in his ears, old blue iPod clutched

    in a fist that he holds a little aloft
    as he presses the small metal song-box

    against the air’s clammy ribs
    his expression abstracted yet intent

    as if he’s never not on shift:
    with the smallest of stethoscopes

    auscultates our era’s
    serious irregularities.

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***

Fizza Abbas is a Freelance Content Writer based in Karachi, Pakistan. She is fond of poetry and music. Her works have been published on quite a few platforms including Poetry Village and Poetry Pacific.

Daniel Bennett was born in Shropshire and lives and works in London. His poems have been published in numerous places, including Wild Court, The Frogmore Papers and Poetry Birmingham. His first collection West South North, North South East was published in 2019.

Tony Beyer writes in Taranaki, New Zealand. He is the author of Anchor Stone (2017) and Friday Prayers (2019), both from Cold Hub Press. Recent work has appeared in Hamilton Stone Review, Landfall, Mudlark, NZ Poetry Shelf and Otoliths.

Zoe Brooks lives in Gloucestershire. She’s had poems recently published in Birmingham Poetry Journal, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Prole, and Fenland Reed. Her collection Owl Unbound will be published by Indigo Dreams in Autumn 2020. She is currently working on a collection about her time in the Czech Republic

Curtis Brown is a British, London-based creative who believes in the promiscuity of poetry. He uses various art forms to tell tales, and is excited by the fact that poetry inevitably permeates them all.

Molly Burnell is based in the Northamptonshire countryside, she’s intrigued by the beauty found in the ugly and vice versa, with special interest in anything and everything ecological. She’s appeared in several issues of The Dawntreader, the university anthology, Heritage, and soon to be featured in Sarasvati, as well as Slice of the Moon Books’ anthology, Earth, We Are Listening.

James Roderick Burns’ fourth short-form collection, Height of Arrows, is due from Duck Lake Books in 2020. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The North and The Scotsman. He lives in Edinburgh and serves as Deputy Registrar General for Scotland.

Alison Campbell, from Aberdeen, now lives in London. She is a teacher/counsellor with poems in publications, including Obsessed with Pipework, The Curlew, The Poetry Village, Dunlin ‘Port’ anthology and Reach. She was shortlisted for Segora Poetry Prize, 2018 and commended in the Barnet Poetry competition 2017, 2018. She has work forthcoming in Dawntreader and Sarasvati.

Phil Connolly is married and lives near York. He taught for many years in North Africa and the Middle East. He was shortlisted in the Wordsworth Trust Competition and has been published in several anthologies and magazines including The High Window, London Grip, The North and Dream Catcher.

Julia Duke is a nature writer and poet who has found her inspiration living in England, Wales and the Netherlands. She has written a regular literary column for the HagueOnLine and published poems in various magazines and anthologies, including Fifth Elephant (Newtown poets anthology) and the Suffolk Poetry Society magazine Twelve Rivers

Marie Dullaghan was born in Dublin. She is a retired education worker, fine arts photographer, musician, actor, writer and poet. A long-term member of both the Poeticians and Punch collectives in Dubai, she has performed regularly at events including the Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature. Has work has been published in The Shop, The High Window and elsewhere.

Pascal Fallas is a writer and (occasional) photographer currently living in Norfolk, UK. His poems have recently appeared in The Fenland Poetry Journal, Brittlestar and The Alchemy Spoon. For more information, or to make contact, please visit www.pascalfallas.com.

Mary Franklin’s poems have appeared in numerous print and online magazines and anthologies including Bonnie’s Crew, Ink Sweat and Tears, Iota, London Grip, Nine Muses Poetry, The Stare’s Nest and Three Drops from a Cauldron. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Leona Gom was born on a remote farm in northern Alberta, Canada. She has published six books of poetry and eight novels, and her work has won several awards and appeared in many anthologies and translations. Her novel The Y Chromosome has recently been reprinted by Cormorant Books

Stuart Henson’s most recent collection is The Way You Know It, New & Selected Poems (Shoestring 2018). A book of sonnets sent on postcards, in collaboration with John Greening, is due from Red Squirrel this November.

Robin Houghton’s most recent pamphlet Why? was a joint winner of the Live Canon Pamphlet Competition in 2019. Her poetry appears in many magazines including Agenda, Magma, Mslexia, Poetry News, The Frogmore Papers and The Rialto, and in numerous anthologies. Awards and competition successes include the Hamish Canham Prize and the Poetry Society Stanza Competition.

Jack Houston is Hackney Library’s poet in residence. His work has previously appeared in a few anthologies and Blackbox Manifold, The Butcher’s Dog, London Grip, Magma, Poetry London and Stand.

Sarah James/Leavesley is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer. Her most recent project is > Room, an Arts Council England funded multimedia hypertext poetry narrative. Collections include How to Grow Matches (Against The Grain Poetry Press, 2018) and plenty-fish (Nine Arches Press, 2015), both shortlisted in the International Rubery Book Award. Her website is at http://sarah-james.co.uk

Jennifer Johnson was born in the Sudan and has worked as a VSO agriculturalist in Zambia and later as an editorial assistant. She has a pamphlet Footprints on Africa and Beyond (Hearing Eye, 2006) and a book Hints and Shadows (Nettle Press, 2017).

Peter Kenny writes poems, plays, short stories and, as Skelton Yawngrave, adventures for children. His poetry includes The Nightwork (Telltale Press 2014) and A Guernsey Double (2010, Guernsey Arts Commission) a new pamphlet Sin Cycle, is due this year. Find him at peterkenny.co.uk

Lancashirep-born Angela Kirby now lives in London but has also lived in France and spent much time in Spain and the US. Her poems are widely published, have been read on Radio Four and TV, and have appeared On the Busses. She gives frequent readings in the UK, Europe and the US. Her 5th collection, Look Left, Look Right … came out in April 2019.

Phil Kirby’s collections are Watermarks and The Third History. Poems since in Poetry Ireland and others. A teen novella, Hidden Depths, is available on the Kindle platform. He has been organising ‘Writers at The Goods Shed’ in Tetbury

.Jane Kirwan’s latest poetry collection was published in 2019 by Blue Door Press. The poems move between a village in Central Bohemia and one of a similar size in the West of Ireland, between a Goose Woman and a grandmother

Marion McCready lives in Dunoon, Argyll. She is the author of two poetry collections – Tree Language (Eyewear Publishing, 2014) and Madame Ecosse (2017).

Jane McLaughlin’s poetry has appeared in many magazines and anthologies (including London Grip). and The New European. She has received awards and commendations in national competitions including the National Poetry Competition long list, Hippocrates Open, Torriano, and Torbay competitions. Her collection is published by Cinnamon Press. She also writes and publishes short stories.

Kathleen McPhilemy grew up in Belfast but now lives in Oxford. She has published three collections of poetry, the most recent being The Lion in the Forest (Katabasis, 2005).

Nancy Mattson’s fourth full collection is Vision on Platform 2 (Shoestring 2018). She contributed the title poem for Her Other Language, an anthology of Northern Irish women’s writings on domestic violence, ed. Ruth Carr & Natasha Cuddington, (Arlen House 2020).

Emma Neale is a writer and editor based in New Zealand, who has had 6 collections of poetry and 6 novels published. She has a collection of short stories due out later this year. This year she received the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry. She is the current editor of Landfall

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet and sometime creative writing tutor at Trinity College, Carmarthen. He has published widely and in roughly equal measures in Britain and the USA. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee for 2020.

Rosemary Norman lives in London and has worked mainly as a librarian. One poem, Lullaby, is much anthologised and her third collection, For example, was published by Shoestring Press in 2016. Since 1995 she has collaborated with video artist Stuart Pound. Her poems become soundtrack, image, and sometimes both, and she has performed live with film. The work has been screened regularly at film and video festivals, and is on Vimeo

Moya Pacey was born and grew up in Middlesbrough in what was then Yorkshire. She now lives in Canberra, Australia. She published her second collection: Black Tulips (Recent Work Press, University of Canberra) in October, 2017. She co-edits the on-line journal, Not Very Quiet notveryquiet.com. Her next collection will be published by Recent Work Press in 2020.

Tom Phillips lives and works in Sofia, Bulgaria. His poetry has been published in a wide range of journals, anthologies, pamphlets and the collections Unknown Translations (Scalino, 2016), Recreation Ground (2012) and Burning Omaha (2003). His plays have been produced by theatres in Bristol and Bath and he currently teaches creative writing and translates contemporary Bulgarian poetry.

Colin Pink’s poems have appeared in various magazines such as Poetry Ireland Review, Acumen, South Bank Poetry, Magma, Under the Radar and Poetry News. He has published two collections: Acrobats of Sound, 2016 from Poetry Salzburg Press and The Ventriloquist Dummy’s Lament, 2019 from Against the Grain Press.

Bethany Rivers has two poetry pamphlets: Off the wall, from Indigo Dreams; the sea refuses no river, from Fly on the Wall Press. Author of Fountain of Creativity: Ways to nourish your writing from Victorina Press. She is editor of the online poetry magazine As Above So Below. She mentors writers from the start of their projects through to publication.
Mary Robinson’s poetry publications include Trace (Oversteps 2020), Alphabet Poems (Mariscat 2019) and The Art of Gardening (Flambard 2010). A poetry/photography collaboration Out of Time was exhibited in 2015. She lives in North Wales. www.poetrypf.co.uk/maryrobinsonpage.shtml

Indian writer Shikhandin has been published worldwide. She has won awards in India and abroad. Books include Immoderate Men (Speaking Tiger) and Vibhuti Cat (Duckbill-Penguin-RHI). Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/Shikhandin/e/B07DHQM6H5/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1533117978&sr=1-2-ent Face Book: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorShikhandin/

Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in, Amsterdam Quarterly, Antipodes, cordite, Poetry New Zealand, Poetry Salzburg Review, Southerly, & Two-Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.

Fraser Sutherland is a poet, editor, and lexicographer. He lives in Toronto.

Tanner was shortlisted for the Erbacce 2020 Poetry Prize. His latest collection Shop Talk: Poems for Shop Workers is published by Penniless Press

Ruth Valentine is a writer & an activist for migrant & refugee rights. Her latest publications are Rubaiyat for the Martyrs of Two Wars and A Grenfell Alphabet. She lives in Tottenham

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